The Little Free Archive Freshener plugin for WordPress is an editorial and SEO tool that helps you keep your posts and pages fresh. I built it for websites with lots of evergreen posts and pages, like Girl Skate Cos. and Lawyerist.
It is a good practice to review your evergreen posts and pages periodically to update and expand the information on them and improve their SEO performance. But if you have a lot of posts and pages it can be hard to keep track of them. Little Free Air Freshener makes it simple by suggesting one at a time for you to work on.
What Little Free Air Freshener Does
Little Free Air Freshener checks for posts that haven’t been updated in a while and gives you a little nudge to update them, one at a time, on your WordPress dashboard.
Here is what it looks like:
If you update that post or page, Little Free Archive Freshener will suggest a new one. Clicking skip for now will give you a new suggestion. (There is a chance the same post or page will come up again, especially if you don’t have many posts and pages left to update.) The ignore it forever option is for posts or pages that don’t ever need to be updated. It skips the post or page and adds it to a list so it will be permanently excluded. (Don’t worry, it’s easy to clear the list.)
That’s all it does. Simple but effective.
Little Free Archive Freshener works well with a search engine optimization plugin that analyzes your content and offers suggestions for improving it, like Yoast SEO. Or you can just use it as a reminder to revisit your posts and pages once in a while to see if you can improve the content or update the information.
Options
By default, Little Free Archive Freshener suggests posts and pages that haven’t been updated in more than 90 days. (WordPress keeps track of the date a post was last modified separately from its publication date.) You can change this in the settings. For example, if you want to update your posts and pages about once a year, change the Freshen After number to 365 days.
You can also choose which post types to include. Little Free Archive Freshener selects from posts and pages by default, but some WordPress themes and plugins add custom post types. For example, WooCommerce adds a product post type, and those product pages might be important for SEO on your website. (The innovation, innovator, and group post types in the image below are custom post types I created for Reinventing Justice.) Custom post types will automatically show up next to Include Post Types in the settings so you can select the ones you want to include.
Finally, you can clear the list of ignored posts if you need to.
How to Get Little Free Archive Freshener
The easiest way to install Little Free Archive Freshener is from the Plugins menu in your WordPress dashboard. Click the Add New button, search for Little Free Archive Freshener, then click Install Now and Activate. For more information and other installation options, visit the WordPress support page.
I hope Little Free Archive Freshener is as helpful for you as it is for me!